"I passed the remainder of the evening at the Princess Dolgorouki's; the
young ladies were in great agitation on account of the sudden
indisposition of their mother, Madame Boulgakow, who had, it seems, caught
cold in her return from the monastery of Troitza, sixty wersts from hence,
a renowned pilgrimage. She had better have stayed at home, for surely
Moscow has sufficient churches in which bigots may pray as long as they
please. When will superstition cease to usurp the place of true religion
in the human mind? I did not pity the _old devotee_, but I felt for the
young ladies, who seemed to be a good deal flurried and fluttered by this
occurrence."

At St. Petersburg:

"June 8-20.--Weather hot and sultry. At two I walked to the Summer Gardens,
which I found full of police-officers and soldiers. To-day there is a
celebrated promenade, that in which the young fillies range themselves in
two rows along the principal alley to be chosen by their future spouse.
However, it was as yet too early for this exhibition, and there was nobody
here except police-officers, the very sight of whom makes me sick; so off
I set, and was caught near the Newski Prospekt in a tremendous
thunder-storm, which forced me to take shelter, first under the arch of a
_porte-cochere_, and secondly in the Casan Church, in which I discovered
for the first time the bâton of Marshal Davoust, stuck up in a glass-case
against one of the piers supporting the dome of the Church. Underneath the
bâton, upon a gilded metal-plate, are two inscriptions, the one in Russ,
the other in Latin, which state that the bâton is that of Marshal Davoust,
taken near Crasnoe, 5th Nov. 1812; so there can be no doubt of the fact."

"I was a good deal amused with a bad painting over the simple unassuming